


alike in dignity

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:48:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There comes a time when you've got to admit that a worst enemy for that many years is actually just a friend you yell at a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	alike in dignity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurel_crown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurel_crown/gifts).



“Goodbye,” Darren tells Geoffrey, walking off the set of the _Hamlet_ he should have known he’d never direct. “It’s been fun.” And it has been. It always is, with Geoffrey.

…

Pistols at dawn, the _dramatics_ of it all, it’s glorious, Darren has been experimenting with performance art for most of the semester, but three hours in Geoffrey Tennant’s company and Darren is starting to worry that nothing he could compose on a stage will ever be capable of producing that kind of unmitigated _fury_.

He’s also bleeding sluggishly through the sleeve of a new, pale blue shirt.

(It’ll be years in Geoffrey’s company before that kind of wardrobe assassination will be reduced to the level of mere minor annoyance in the face of all Geoffrey is capable of.)

“You have ten more thrusts of your transparently phallic aluminum bid for moral supremacy before the blood-loss begins to make me lightheaded and you drive me to the hospital,” Darren proclaims as emphatically as he can manage while leaping sideways out of the range of Geoffrey’s foil and trying not to pant. Darren is a paragon of physical strength, his body is a finely tuned instrument, but it’s true that most of the time, he doesn’t do much running or much jumping, and now he is doing a lot of both.

“Do you yield, vile miscreant?” Geoffrey demands, wild-eyed and grinning, and Darren can’t help but smile back, parries again, answers, “Surely you can’t think it’s a fair fight, if I’ve got such a disadvantage.” Darren pauses a moment to gulp in air and resolve, briefly, to cut down smoking, if his lung capacity is getting this bad. How far he could project with stronger lungs? It seems like the kind of thing to find out. He goes on, “I’m certain you couldn’t want a mere,” gasping in a breath, “hollow victory, over a wounded man?”

Geoffrey is starting to look a bit the worse for wear himself, all sweaty-faced and tousled, boyish curls at odds with the vicious expression on his face. “We didn’t stop at first blood, Darren,” Geoffrey answers him, voice low and almost teasing. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

Darren clearly doesn’t, and isn’t in the _mood_ to be wasting his breath telling Geoffrey so, just shakes his head, trying to knock a strand of hair caught in his glasses back in the same moment, which makes his glasses nearly go crashing down, and Darren is hurriedly shoving them up the bridge of his nose when Geoffrey finishes, “It means it’s a duel to the death,” sounding far too pleased with himself.

…

Darren doesn’t stay at New Burbage long as artistic director. They banned him from buying fireworks after the third fire, and anyway, all the pyrotechnics in the world aren’t enough to make Darren the kind of man who goes down with a sinking ship, and Richard seems intent on running the place into the ground.

Well, no sinking ships for Darren _unless_ you count the massive, glaring one that is theater itself as a medium, which Darren always does. One doomed love affair is plenty for him, thanks, and if there’s going to be one, it may as well be the grand, sweeping concept, not some persnickety little provincial theater.

He’s packing when he gets the call, lifts the phone to his ear but doesn’t answer, and listens to Geoffrey breathe down the phone-line until he has apparently girded his loins enough to start the conversation, by saying, “This isn’t my idea.”

Darren thinks it’s incredibly unfair that Geoffrey always gets to be the one who comes off sounding long-suffering when they talk, when there have been days over the course of their acquaintance when it has seemed like he has taken a perverse glee in making Darren suffer. The number of times Darren has been stabbed alone should earn him all the long-suffering sighs available in a given conversation.

“Rather masochistic of you, then, to be calling anyway,” Darren tells him.

Geoffrey’s little relic of theaters past in Montreal is actually doing rather well—there’s something about his sheer, bloody minded, slavish adherence to a long-dead and moldering, rotting-in-its-grave text that goes around the bend past dull and ancient, and doubles around back to new and exciting. Darren thinks that must be where the wave of modest success is coming from. Though he’ll admit it out loud anywhere Geoffrey might hear _over his dead body_.

“You could direct a play,” Geoffrey offers, vague and pained, into the silence of Darren’s cardboard-box-piled apartment.

“I could,” Darren agrees. “I can. I will, in fact. Brilliant deduction, Geoffrey.”

“Here,” Geoffrey grinds out, and it sounds like every word pains him. “You could direct a play here. _Medea_ ,” he offers, as an afterthought, and oh, that is tempting, layers of the foreigner, the barbarian, the woman, the other, all piled high with vats of blood, ascencion above it all in Grandfather-the-sun’s chariot to top it off, nepotism at its finest, and horses and fire _right in the text_. The chariot will have to be suspended on wires. Geoffrey certainly won’t have the budget for that. Perhaps Darren will hold a bake sale. Darren hasn’t felt this kind of zing of ideas in months. Sometimes ancient, dead plays loop back around to being so forgotten they have shock value again.

And Darren has been growing tired of musicals.

…

Darren is twenty-two years old, he is not a child, he can be mature, he can and move past provocation, he can _entirely ignore_ Geoffrey’s infantile protest outside the opening night of his _Much Ado_. He’s doing fine.

He’s doing fine, except that just as he’s walking in from taking a smoke outside during intermission, he makes the mistake of actually reading the protest sign Geoffrey is holding.

For one thing, it’s very _Geoffrey_ , that the protest sign scrawled in sharpie across a flattened cardboard box includes the word “claptrap.” Very quaint. Darren would almost be charmed, but the word that precedes it enrages him too much for amusement.

“Derivative,” really? There are a few things he’d taken _inspiration_ from, but—Darren will show him _derivative_ next time. _Derivative_ Darren’s ass.

Geoffrey will eat his words over Darren's next production. Tonight, he will eat dirt. Instead of walking back in to watch the second half, Darren lowers his head and charges.

…

Darren steps of the bus and takes a deep breath in. Ah, Montreal, something almost resembling an urban landscape on this godforsaken slice of continent. He spots Geoffrey lurking around the arrivals sign glowering and smiles. Life gets dull when you spend too long without a nemesis.

**Author's Note:**

> title is, of course, from R&J, largely because I think it'd piss them both off. Happy yuletide, laurel_crown. Sorry I didn't give myself enough time to work in some actual Much Ado About Nothing for you. Huge thanks to [blurred out censorship field] for the read through.


End file.
